The present invention relates to a method or module for language neutral syntax representations. More particularly, the present invention relates to an application for creating a language neutral representation using a language particular syntax representation.
A wide variety of applications would find it beneficial to accept inputs in natural language. For example, if machine translation systems, information retrieval systems, command and control systems (to name a few) could receive natural language inputs from a user, this would be highly beneficial to the user.
In the past, this has been attempted by first performing a surface-based syntactical analysis on the natural language input to obtain a syntactic analysis of the input. Of course, the surface syntactic analysis is particular to the individual language in which the user input is expressed, since languages vary widely in constituent order, morphosyntax, etc.
Thus, the surface syntactic analysis was conventionally subjected to further processing to obtain some type of semantic of quasi-semantic representation of the natural language input. Some examples of such semantic representations include the Quasi Logical Form in Alashawi et al., TRANSLATION BY QUASI LOGICAL FORM TRANSFER, Proceedings of ACL 29:161-168 (1991); the Underspecified Discourse Representation Structures set out in Reyle, DEALING WITH AMBIGUITIES BY UNDER SPECIFICATION: CONSTRUCTION, REPRESENTATION AND DEDUCTION, Journal of Semantics 10:123-179 (1993); the Language for Underspecified Discourse Representations set out in Bos, PREDICATE LOGIC UNPLUGGED, Proceedings of the Tenth Amsterdam Colloquium, University of Amsterdam (1995) ; and the Minimal Recursion Semantics set out in Copestake et al., TRANSLATION USING MINIMAL RECURSION SEMANTICS, Proceedings of TMI-95 (1995), and Copestake et al., MINIMAL RECURSION SEMANTICS: AN INTRODUCTION, MS., Stanford University (1999).
While such semantic representations can be useful, it is often difficult, in practice, and unnecessary for many applications, to have a fully articulated logical or semantic representation. For example, in a machine translation system, all that is required to translate the phrases into the French equivalents “chat noir” which is literally translated as “cat black” and “probléme legal” which is literally translated as “problem legal” is that the adjective modifies the noun in some way.
A language neutral syntax (LNS) representation provides a semantically motivated generally more neutral syntactical natural representation from which an application-specific representation can be derived. Predicate-argument structures derived from LNS are used as the transfer representation in the MSR-MT system. Other applications make use of other representations derived from LNS. These include extractions of bilingual collections, multi-document summarizations, automatic quiz generation, sentence classification and document classification. Presently, derivation of the LNS representation is limited to a NLPWin parser.